The space economy's real wealth is in the startups under SpaceX

The headline company is the wrong bet

Muzamil opens the episode with a warning aimed at the most obvious target in space tech. The company everyone is watching, he argues, is genuinely strong and sits in an industry with enormous room to grow. But it has already extracted its liquidity from the public, paid its early investors, and is heading toward a moment where those investors can finally sell.

“तो काफ़ी chances हैं कि उसके stock prices जो इस वक़्त की valuation है उससे काफ़ी हद तक गिर जाए,” he says. The valuation is propped up by narrative, and narrative is not the same as the underlying technology. When the price corrects, ordinary buyers will be the ones told a “great depression” arrived.

His point is not bearishness on space. The underlying technology, he stresses, is bringing a genuine revolution; SpaceX was the first proper space company to prove and validate the model. The caution is narrower than that — it is precision about where the money actually is. The IPO, he suggests, is the trade built for the public; the real upside sat with the early investors and the startups, not the late buyer chasing a validated name.

The reward goes to whoever understands the mechanics first

The thread running through the entire episode is positioning. “जो smart लोग हैं इतना जल्दी वह इसकी underlying mechanics और यह underlying technological evolution या revolution को समझ लेंगे, उतना जल्दी वह अपने आप को smartly place कर सकते हैं,” Muzamil says.

He puts the principle plainly: “जो सबसे ज़्यादा क़रीब होता है ना evolutions के और जितना ज़्यादा जो early होता है उसको सबसे ज़्यादा rewards मिलते हैं.” Proximity and timing are the edge.

He grounds it in his own observation of SpaceX. Six months before the IPO he learned of an early employee whose stock, granted in place of a large salary, had once been valued around sixty million dollars. The lesson is not envy. It is that the largest gains accrued to people who joined an unglamorous frontier early.

The pattern of every industrial revolution

To explain why space matters now, Muzamil reaches for history. America’s early big-tech moment did not look globally exciting at first; the exciting companies of that era were telecom firms. Yet the people who entered the new technology early received comfortable stock and outsized growth.

The mechanism is always the same. “जब भी industrial revolution आती है ना या कोई भी नई industry खुल रही होती है तो उस industry के पीछे हमेशा underlying कोई एक economic value होती है, कोई एक cost होती है जो कि एकदम से deflate हो जाती है,” he explains.

Electricity, mechanization, cars, the internet — each drove down the cost of a base variable. Cheap distribution online, he notes, produced millions of influencers, creators, and short-form films. The deflating cost is what unlocks the new economy on top of it.

For space, the base variable is cost per kilogram

The base variable for space is unambiguous: the cost of taking anything from Earth to orbit. SpaceX’s core mission, Muzamil says, was to reduce it. Governments never optimized for cost; they were chasing prestige in the USSR-versus-America race, which is why the Apollo era did not sustain itself.

SpaceX attacked the primary cost — the rockets themselves, which were previously discarded — by making them reusable. The number Muzamil tracks has fallen from thousands of dollars to roughly fifteen hundred dollars per kilogram across 2025 to 2027.

He frames the forecasts carefully. A conservative McKinsey and World Economic Forum estimate puts the industry at around 1.8 trillion dollars by 2035 at an eleven percent annual growth rate, while Morgan Stanley and PwC project much larger figures toward 2050. In the year before the IPO, venture capitalists put roughly 12.4 billion dollars into space startups — high-growth bets where, as he puts it, one dollar can become a thousand if the company succeeds.

A staircase of cost thresholds

The most useful part of the episode is Muzamil’s map of which opportunities open at which price. The industry, he stresses, has become a sustainable economy that funds and fuels itself, with commercial activity rising as government share falls.

At fifteen hundred dollars per kilogram, communications satellites like Starlink are already profitable, processing more than 600 terabytes per second of bandwidth, and competitors across China, America, and Europe are rushing in. Imaging-as-a-service is live too — he cites Pakistan’s FarmDar pulling crop and soil insight from satellite imagery.

Lower the cost and new layers become viable. At five hundred dollars per kilogram, commercial space stations pencil out. The existing station is retiring around 2030 — a point Muzamil says was confirmed in an earlier on-channel conversation with a prospective Pakistani astronaut — and three or four commercial replacements are being deployed to take its place. Boeing, Blue Origin, the Chinese government, and multiple private firms across America and Europe are all building them. He frames these as infrastructure: orbital hubs that exist to manage satellites, remove debris, and stage repairs, the way a port serves the ships around it. Companies like Orbit Fab, Starfish Space, and GITAI are already building the robots and the infrastructure layer to maintain and repair what flies up there.

Lower still, manufacturing in space — pharmaceuticals and other high-value goods made in vacuum, controlled on a molecular level — shifts from a nice-to-have to a profitable export. Today, he notes, that kind of production is “a cost center, it’s a nice to have,” because the economic viability is not there yet; drop the launch cost and it flips to high-margin physical exports. Above all that, he floats orbital compute — SpaceX’s idea of putting data centers in space, even if only partially — and space-harvested solar energy, where capturing and processing energy in orbit and beaming down bits and bytes rather than the energy itself is the real economic incentive, since roughly half the energy is otherwise lost in transmission. He also points to Aero Drive, working on spacecraft autonomy as a service, as the kind of quiet layer that becomes essential as the orbital fleet grows.

”Made in space,” tourism, and the Moon

Further down the staircase the use cases turn almost cinematic. At two hundred dollars per kilogram, simulating zero gravity becomes more expensive than achieving it, and production moves to orbit. The output, Muzamil says, will be goods “जो made in China, made in Japan नहीं होंगी, वह made in space होंगी.”

At fifty dollars per kilogram, lunar economics work. The United States and China both target lunar bases between roughly 2032 and 2035, and putting astronauts there means sending supplies in and out regularly — only viable, Muzamil notes, once payload reaches that fifty-dollar threshold. Startups are already designing Moon-surface hotels for the trillionaire investors of that era, places where millionaire and billionaire tourists might stay for a few days. Around them sits the harder infrastructure: oxygen, fuel, habitat, three-dimensional printing, and hydroponic plant growth, much of it built from materials mined on the Moon itself rather than shipped up. By 2035, he says, the technology and equipment in place should let propellant be produced autonomously on the lunar surface more cheaply than carrying it from Earth — “ये बहुत powerful moment होगा,” because it breaks the dependence on launching everything from the ground.

He does the arithmetic out loud. When the cost falls from fifteen hundred dollars toward ten dollars per kilogram, a whole rocket sent for a few people changes economics completely. A million-dollar space-tourism ticket, divided by today’s fifteen hundred and multiplied by a future ten dollars per kilogram, lands around 6,666 dollars. “$6,000 still is a lot of money but space में जाने के लिए that’s not a lot of money to spend,” he notes — and while he jokes that “हम तो बेचारे ग़रीब लोग हैं,” in the western world, where GDP per capita runs eighty to ninety thousand dollars, seven thousand dollars puts space tourism within regular reach. That is the moment the staircase stops being abstract and starts changing who participates.

Where the jobs actually open

Having mapped the cost curve, Muzamil returns to his real subject: people. The mistake is staring only at SpaceX. Beneath the liquidity event, he argues, hundreds of companies will form and millions of jobs will follow.

He reels off the layers without hype, and frames the exercise as practical career research: look at what these companies are, what jobs they post, and which skills you would need to work there one day. Reusability and launch: Stoke Space as a direct competitor, and Relativity Space, which raised 650 million dollars and works across total manufacturing. SpaceX, he notes, is really a 360-degree infrastructure company that buys parts and components from many vendors — which is itself a reminder that the supply chain is where much of the work lives. European players focus on small launches that reach low Earth orbit.

Then the servicing layer: AstroScale, a Japanese company on orbital debris mitigation, because a hundred thousand satellites eventually means dangerous garbage that has to be mapped, understood, and cleared. Starfish Space on repair, life extension, and maintenance of high-value satellites. Impulse Space on last-mile delivery once you are already in orbit. Earth observation companies — one formerly a startup, now publicly listed — providing imagery down to ten-centimeter resolution as a service. He flags a contrarian player going big rather than small, betting that large-scale satellites unlock data centers and other high-value use cases. France’s E-Space is building IoT infrastructure targeting a hundred thousand satellites by 2030; India’s Pixxel works the orbital observation space; and Arclysis is rebuilding the assembly hubs where components are fitted and manufacturing happens in orbit. The list, he says, is long and full of “बड़े मज़े मज़े” use cases — pharmaceuticals, tourism, lunar hotels. He also notes how many US-based companies have Indian-origin co-founders, a sign of how deeply India has embedded itself in this frontier.

His framing of AI ties it together. “जहां पर AI आपकी generic standard नौकरियां ख़त्म कर रहा है अब दुनिया नई नौकरियों की तरफ़ जाएगी,” he says — and space, alongside robotics and cybersecurity, is one of those frontiers, exactly as the industrial revolution eventually moved displaced workers into a new range of jobs. Most of these millions of people, he is quick to add, will never go to space themselves; they will work the economy underneath it. He closes with a small AI aside in the same spirit — a company disrupting MRI machines at a fraction of the cost with no radiation — as one more example of where new opportunity is opening for those who look early.

By the end, the takeaway is the same one he opened with, now fully earned. Track the cost per kilogram, understand the mechanics early, and position underneath the headlines rather than chasing them. “Space is one of those frontiers जहां पर millions of new jobs will work,” Muzamil says — and the people who read the cost curve first are the ones who get there in time.